The travel system and methods are intended to be used throughout the travel industry, including by passengers, providers of travel services and transportation means, financial institutions and transaction processors offering electronic payment means and clearing of those payments, and by service providers of other travel-related services. To facilitate the intended use, a portable passenger card will be utilized. The card will be compiled and issued as a multi-application means for storage and processing of data and information, decision logic support and communications purposes, and identification and authentication schemes; as well as for hosting a traveler's pass, payment purse and a plurality of application-specific traveling services.
The system deploys a plurality of functional components and a set of computer programs to implement its operational tasks, including the communications of data and the usage of the passenger card between and among the above system user.
The functional components encompass, for example, PCs or other computing platforms, POS-terminals and PIN-tablets, ATM-machines, card read/write devices, biometrics boxes and other computer peripherals, and the passenger card per se. These components are connected via a multi-directional communications link to allow the exchange of data/information between and among the systems entities including the cardholder. The system components are off-the-shelf hardware devices that can be purchased from retailers/computer stores, procured from component manufacturers or its distributors, or acquired from providers of networking/communications services. The communication links can be implemented via the Internet or any other commercial available, wire-based or wireless network technology.
The computer programs perform the house-keeping assignments, computing and decisioning functions, application-specific routines, and the communications/networking tasks necessary for the system's operations and card usage. These programs further include security means, such as cryptographic schemes, digital signatures and authenticity codes, to protect the system, cardholders and card contents against fraudulent use. The software programs reside within the system's components including the electronic passenger card. In this way, a cardholder/system user can instruct the system to select and execute a plurality of computerized means or operational functions under the auspices of the software programs and the guidance of command buttons, template files and pull-up/pop-down menus embedded into the system or stored in the card.
The system further comprises a database scheme for storing a set of data and information in a distributed manner among a plurality of database components associated with the plurality of system users, including the passenger card. The database scheme comprises means for automatically interchanging a selected number of data elements, from among said set of data/information, between and among all database components via the communication link whenever such data elements are inputted including modified by a particular system entity. In this way, the network of system database components, including the passenger card per se, acts and behaves as a single integrated database that always contains and automatically delivers--anytime, anywhere--the most up to date set of those data and information.